Adam Liptak

Mr. Liptak, a lawyer, joined The Times’s news staff in 2002 and began covering the Supreme Court in the fall of 2008. He has written a column, “Sidebar,” on developments in the law, since 2007.

Mr. Liptak’s series on ways in which the United States’s legal system differs from those of other developed nations, “American Exception,” was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting.

In 2005, Mr. Liptak examined the rise in life sentences in the United States in a three-part series. The next year, he and two colleagues studied connections between contributions to the campaigns of justices on the Ohio Supreme Court and those justices’ voting records. He was a member of the teams that examined the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller at The Times.

Mr. Liptak was born in Stamford, Conn., on Sept. 2, 1960. He first joined The Times as a copyboy in 1984, after graduation from Yale University, where he was an editor of The Yale Daily News Magazine, with a degree in English. In addition to clerical work and fetching coffee, he assisted the reporter M.A. Farber in covering the trial of a libel suit brought by Gen. William Westmoreland against CBS.

Mr. Liptak returned to Yale for a law degree, graduating in 1988. During law school, he worked as a summer clerk in the The New York Times Company’s legal department. After graduating, he spent four years at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a New York City law firm, as a litigation associate specializing in First Amendment matters.

In 1992, he returned to The Times’s legal department, spending a decade advising The Times and the company's other newspapers, television stations and new media properties on defamation, privacy, newsgathering and related issues, and he frequently litigated media and commercial cases. He has taught media law at the Columbia University School of Journalism, U.C.L.A. Law School and Yale Law School.

While working as a lawyer, Mr. Liptak wrote occasional book reviews for The Times and The New York Observer and contributed to other sections of The Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Business Week and The American Lawyer. He has written several law review articles as well, generally on First Amendment topics.

Mr. Liptak lives in Washington with his wife, Jennifer Bitman, a veterinarian, and their children Ivan and Katie.

June 30, 2015, Tuesday

The court has agreed to take another look at a challenge to the use of race in admissions decisions by the University of Texas at Austin, reviving a challenge to affirmative action in higher education.

June 30, 2015, Tuesday

Multimedia

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for The Times, discussed a case on judicial elections, Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, with the specific issue being whether judges can ask for campaign money.